Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I write for entertainment purposes only and not for pay.
Author's Note: I apologize for the delay on the chapter! Long story short, it's just been a very busy few weeks since our vacation. I'm hoping to get back to a regular schedule, however, so I wanted to go ahead and get this chapter out now for your viewing pleasure. Things will really get rolling soon as we begin to follow Sirius around, but this chapter is back to Ginny for a bit as we see her relationship with Lucretia grow. Please let me know your thoughts on it. I enjoy every review!
TriggerWarning: Brief and vague mentions of sexual assault. Perhaps not too triggering, but I wanted to mention it just in case.
Prisoner 79934: Ginevra Weasley
By: Rae
-A Harry Potter Story-
Two weeks had passed by since the Minister's visit. Ginny's family had come to see her again, well, her parents did. She asked them about what the Minister had told her and watched both their faces crumple with the spoiled surprise.
Gavin Putterglen, it turned out, was a retired adjudicator and representative who had come out of retirement at the gilding of his palms and the request of Arthur and Molly to try and help their daughter. They talked up Putterglen's expertise, but Ginny heard the undercurrent of concern and frustration that they weren't able to give her any more good news.
She asked the date when they arrived. It was September 5, only days after the Hogwarts Express departed the station and took her brothers and friends back to Hogwarts. She'd avoided any reaction to that but cried when she got back to her cell. She wouldn't see her brothers again till winter break. She counted out the days and months ahead but stopped that line of thinking when she felt herself breaking down again.
This visit with just her parents was the first test of her endurance. Molly and Arthur had little in the way of good news and were more concerned for her health and wellbeing, leaving her little time to try and convince them to take her questions seriously. Still she'd tried to get them to pursue the line of questions she'd refined, but somehow they always seemed to brush them aside.
Now she sat in the mostly silent cell, waiting for Lucretia to say something to break the awkward silence that had fallen. They'd been working through another set of hexes and incantations the older witch told Ginny were important for her development. They'd moved past much of what she thought might be covered in her charms classes, but at the same time, Ginny knew Lucretia was entirely unconcerned with what Hogwarts might teach her.
The charm she was working on now was one Ginny wasn't certain she'd ever have a use for, but Lucretia insisted. Since the older witch would routinely scream obscenities whenever Ginny argued about the validity of her choices, Ginny kept her mouth shut aside from repeating the charm repetitively till she'd memorized the way it felt on her tongue and the exact tones to get the required effect.
"Again."
Lucretia was more lucid today than the day before, but the Dementors had visited them both yesterday. Ginny resisted the urge to growl at the woman. She'd been repeating the charm for what felt like an hour now and hadn't messed it up since her third attempt.
She opened her mouth to speak when Lucretia sighed loudly, scraping a nail against the stone floors.
"You probably don't see why I'm teaching you this charm," she said at length, her voice almost normal in tone. Ginny stared at the back wall in surprise. "It's so I can teach you the counter charm that will break it. Half the things you need to learn are curses and counter curses so you can get yourself out of a fix."
Ginny stayed silent, never certain when speaking would send her companion into some kind of rant, or worse, a screaming fit.
"I learned that charm when I was 10," Lucretia continued. "Taught my sisters as well. Served us all well in school."
Her jaw dropped. "Someone used that on you in school?" Ginny couldn't help asking. She reddened at the very thought, horrified.
Lucretia's creaky laugh filled the air, broken in places and less shrill than normal. "Gryffindor filth," she said, almost fondly. "Of course you'd know nothing of what happens in other houses, would you?" The laughter continued a minute, and she said, "In Slytherin, you learn to protect yourself or your housemates will teach you the hard way."
"Your housemates did that to you?" Ginny shook her head in confusion. "Why?"
"You don't know much, do you? Pureblood but so pathetic." She scoffed. "It's normal for a man to check the goods before he buys them." Ginny coughed to stop voicing her thoughts. Lucretia ignored her. "You can't expect a man to buy something without checking it out, can you? I was a third year when they caught me. It's considered a rite of passage."
Ginny sat still, trying not to consider what awful rites of passage the Slytherin House must undergo.
"I was promised from the age of 10," she said in a singsong tone. "We were cousins, but he was fine. He wanted to know what he was getting." She cackled now, shrilly. "I tried to avoid it, made it, too, for two years. But when he rounded up that little gang of his…" she trailed off.
The silence fell for a moment longer.
"They caught me one night in the hall outside the common room," she said, voice like stone. "He disarmed me, and then they thought they'd have a bit of sport. First he used that charm. It was cold. He and his buddies used a stinging hex or two. It's hard to remember now. They shoved me around between them, and then he might have...but it didn't matter." The flat tone to her voice was cold, emotionless, as she said, "She came out of the room and sent them running off, cackling like hyenas. She helped me get my wand back and performed the counter charm."
Ginny sat in suspended silence as her companion spoke. Her mind filled with unpleasant images, placing herself in Lucretia's shoes as she listened.
"This is the kind of charm you need in your arsenal," she said flatly. "You might be Gryffindor filth now, but I can guarantee that if you ever get out of here, you need to know these things. You don't think your enemies will care if you're unprepared, do you?"
A certain tone crept back into her speech, and Lucretia said, "You're never getting out of here. No one does. If this keeps you sane longer, fine. We all go insane sometime. Do you know how long I've been here?"
Ginny swallowed and said, "No." It wasn't something she'd asked. Questions about Lucretia generally got her screamed at, so she'd avoided unleashing her curiosity.
"Eleven years."
Ginny gasped softly, her jaw dropping. The other woman laughed at that, the edges of madness filtering into the shrill cackle.
The laughter stopped abruptly, and silence filled the two cells. In the distance, prisoners screamed or wailed, and the ambient sounds of Azkaban filled the quiet as it usually did. Ginny sat, her back pressed against the wall, knees drawn up so she could rest her chin on them.
"They called me mad before I ever came here. Claimed I was insane for following my Lord. So I let them. Perhaps I am mad, but we're all a little mad here." Lucretia's voice was soft, thick with thought and the cracked quality it had developed over time. "I'm getting out of here someday, and I will join him again."
The steadfast determination in her voice gave Ginny pause. So many times Lucretia had claimed there was never going to be a way to freedom for any of them. She'd said over and over that nothing and no one could help any of the prisoners escape, but now to hear the conviction in her tone, Ginny wondered if perhaps Lucretia knew something she didn't.
"He's coming back, you know," the singsong, mad quality returned to her voice, and Ginny cringed. "He'll be back for me, girl he tolerated." There was a bitter edge now as well. "Perhaps he'll come for you, too?" A snort then. "You'd like that, wouldn't you, Heir of Slytherin?"
And now she cackled, shrieking with manic glee, nails scratching the floor in her mania. Ginny lay back onto her pallet, recognizing her companion's loss of herself again. This happened so often Ginny recognized the signs. Lucretia would be at this for hours, and Ginny pressed her fingers to her ears as she repeated the charm and counter charm they'd just worked on. Better to study than to let herself lapse into the same mania.
It was what colored the walls of Azkaban, Ginny had decided. The gray needed some kind of splash of color, so the inmates provided it with their voices and whatever other sounds they could produce. Whether it was the scrape of overly long nails on the stone floors or the thud of their bodies thrown against the walls over and over or the thwack of a head banging against the floor, the inmates colored Azkaban in all shades of madness.
Ginny knew the longer she was here, the more she would turn to shades of madness just to pass the time. The thought filled her with both fear and a strange anticipation of the relief it would bring to simply float away from herself. To become less Ginny and more the collective madness that resided here.
Still, she refused to give in. Yet.
